Enough with the "end of reading" riff

Slate's sharp-witted book reviewer Laura Miller has read scads of articles and books declaring that "reading is dead" and she declares that she's had enough. The digital age has posed a threat to reading habits and changed the commerece of the book selling trade for good and ill, lets admit, but Miller wearies of the sad panic over the alleged end of literacy in our lifetime. Knock it off, she says , find another idea. It is perilous to declare any particular activity “dead,” given our previous attempts to wish away theater, painting, poetry, broadcast television, and even movies. They have been declared dead, individually and collectively, at various times over the decades, yet somehow they always rise from the coroner’s table and continue to thrive. Jazz is dead; vinyl records are dead; CDs are dead. People rely on statistics, polls, and other dubious databases to construct grand theories about why things supposedly become moribund, but other indicators contradict the claim that reading has ceased to be a social activity. 

Print book sales total around 707 million units, well above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, and represent roughly three-quarters of all book sales. Bookstores were also placed on the endangered-species list by futurists and were supposed to vanish. Yet, according to the AP, American Booksellers Association (ABA) membership has nearly tripled over the decade, reaching more than 3,400 members across over 3,700 locations—the highest level since the late 1990s. Independent bookstores remain under pressure, and margins are razor-thin, but there is obvious consumer demand. Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated—a kind of make-believe in their own right.

There is a definite social movement among people who want to read entire books, as the rate at which new bookstores are opening has remained steady for quite some time. What readers are buying—self-help, romance, sci-fi, mystery, popular psychology, or celebrity biographies—is not especially relevant; attracting and retaining customers requires a broad, well-curated selection of categories. Margins are thin, but the bookstores that open are staying open. Sales at my bookstore are generally good—sometimes very brisk, at other times slower—but we remain a going concern. Those who purchase the books we specialize in—literature, science, history, philosophy, theater, poetry, music, and art—are indeed reading the many fine volumes they take home. The "reading is dead" trope is dead itself. It should be buried and remain that way, entombed.

NOWHERE, NO WAY, NO HOW

"Nowhere Man" from the Beatles Rubber Soul album, their 6th album and released in 1965, was a low point in that seminal album. Principal writer John Lennon was offering a kind of confession that he'd been a man of many plans but little action, but his strategy to shift the point of  view from confessor to observer is, it seems, catastrophic. I always thought this was one of the weakest things the Beatles ever recorded, seeming to be an obvious effort to write a “message song” in the wake of all the protest music that came before it. The genius of Beatles lyrics was that Lennon and McCartney avoided trying to say “heavy things” deliberately. Both were familiar with contemporary poetry at the time, and it’s my guess that the influence, if any, came from Eliot and Williams, where the messages being delivered, if any, relied on mood, tone, word choice, and the telling detail. "Nowhere Man” eschews all that and puts it out there so the hippies and fellow trend-chasers wouldn’t miss it: “He’s a real nowhere man / Sitting in his nowhere land / Making all his nowhere plans for nobody...” The song has been favorably compared with Eliot’s thematically similar poem “The Hollow Men,” but a side-by-side overview of the song and poem gives Eliot the edge because the poet has the freedom to elaborate on the page the diagnosis he’s chosen to write about. That’s to say, Eliot is frankly better at writing a piece about the shallowness of material pursuits. The advantage of Eliot is that his poem is in the first person and has a confessional quality. It seems like a collection of private thoughts entertained amid the hustle of modern life, with the poem’s narrator ruing the choices he made and the obligations they created for him. The Beatles’ stanzas are judgmental and present us with a verdict, a quality that has always annoyed me, ever since I bought the album decades ago. In shorter form, I think Eliot’s final lines from his poem summarize what’s wrong with “Nowhere Man”: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Far Out magazine, a UK-based online platform, bills itself as an independent voice amid the ever-churning wars inspired by pop musicians. Yet after reading its coverage of these controversies, one is left with the nagging suspicion that rock and pop feuds are routinely overreported, exaggerated, or simply opportunities to hand a microphone to someone famous who has something sour to say about a former colleague—or whoever happens to be dominating social media feeds that week. Much ado about nothing at all? Perhaps. Readers love snark. They love gossip. They love tales of aging geniuses turning into grumpy old folks, shaking their canes and walkers at the birds.

Recently, Far Out ran a squib suggesting that two celebrated pop figures, Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell, share a dislike of the songwriter Paul Simon. The notion is an odd one, if only because it invites us to wonder why their shared antipathy should matter in the first place. Does it really matter what Smith or Mitchell thinks of Simon?Smith fancies herself a poet, a journalist, a writer above all else, and there is nothing wrong with that. Her punk-rock inclinations, however, have always struck me as more performative than anything else. Still, I admire her ability to mash together the things she loves into a visceral presentation that delivers the goods. I enjoy her work, and I appreciate the differences between her and Simon. That she doesn't like him? So what?

Mitchell, meanwhile, has spent her later years taking swipes at her peers, among them Dylan, Zappa, John Lennon, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Don Henley, and Grace Slick. The cumulative impression is that her own work represents the high-water mark of popular music, one that others have failed to reach. She is, of course, an extraordinarily gifted artist who has written and recorded songs that will endure until we stop caring about music altogether. But genius ought not to confer immunity from criticism. Mitchell's own output, particularly in its more pretentious or half-baked moments, could withstand a brutal assessment of its own.

Her apparent grievance with Simon seems to stem, at least in part, from his meticulous craftsmanship: the careful wordsmithing, the painstaking construction, the way he makes music and lyrics fit together. Perhaps she mistakes his craftsmanship for some artistic shortcoming, or simply dislikes an approach to songwriting that differs from her own. Whatever the reason, there is something peculiar about dismissing an artist for being so deliberate in his art.Simon, certainly, is not beyond criticism. There are songs and albums of his that I admire less than others, and his body of work deserves the same kind of honest, unsentimental scrutiny we ought to apply to any major artist. But that is a different discussion, one concerned with the merits and shortcomings of the music itself rather than the personal grievances of its creators. My suspicion is that a fair assessment of Simon's work would come out rather favorably.

As for whether Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell likes him? It's an entertaining bit of gossip, perhaps, but hardly a revelation. Artists need not admire one another, and their disagreements do not automatically amount to anything meaningful. Sometimes a feud is just a feud, a passing squall in the pop-cultural weather. The music, after all, is what ought to matter—and it can speak for itself.

LURKING

 

Elmore Leonard told his readers that if they want to write a piece of fiction, never open up the story with a description of the weather. Fine, thought Lurk, I will open up this tale with something that Leonard said about the weather. And then Lurk lit a cigarette stub that had been crushed in an overflowing ashtray on his desk, resting there like a dry, sunbleached turd until he picked it up between the tips of his thumb and index finger, stuck a wooden match against the scratchy mortar of the brick walls that contained his office and put the flaring stick to the curled and crumpled tip of the formerly svelte cigarette. His lungs filled with the kind of smoke that coats the throat with its unique variety of briar patch harshness.

Lurk coughed, he sneezed, he blew snot all over his black turtle neck sweater he planned on parading around the local house in so the babes would think him Lurk the Poetry Man and the dudes would weep into their lattes and glasses of fresh orange juice thick with clubs of algae-like pulp,weeping becomes Poetry conquers nookie with but a whisper and the right sidelong glance. But now the black turtle neck had snot on it, glistening globs of wretched , runny mung.

This won't do, thought Lurk, thinking about the weather . Then he reminded himself that the coffee shop was closed except for take out orders and the Governor said that no could sit anywhere, and that those on essential missions to get supplies needed to go home and stay there when the needed shopping was done for the day. He felt sad. There was nowhere to go but back to sleep.

THE 21st CENTURY HAS NO GREATEST POET...yet

We can make a case for the “best poet” of the 20th century, I suppose, because the century is over and we have the advantage of hindsight. We can survey the poets, the styles, the innovations, the philosophical and spiritual posturing, the aesthetic manifestos, and the assorted claims made on behalf of one writer or another. We can establish some reasonable criteria, provided we don't mistake them for commandments handed down from Mount Parnassus. Even so, we're left with an overwhelming number of writers whose work matters to the literature of the period. So far, so good. Then the trouble starts.The question of who is the best poet, writer, or playwright carries a rather large piece of unexamined baggage: the assumption that the contestants are playing roughly the same game. They aren't. Ethnicity, cultural upbringing, education, gender (yes, gender), race, sexual orientation, and, most importantly, style and technique all enter the picture. We might pretend these are minor variations on a common theme, but that would require a certain determination not to notice what's going on. How, exactly, do we propose to compare writers whose ideas of what poetry is, what it does, and what it might accomplish are fundamentally different?

Poetry, after all, is one of the oldest forms of literary expression. It didn't begin with the English Romantics, the French Symbolists, or some American professor's discovery that the line break could be used to justify a career. The European traditions inherited by Americans from their former colonial masters represent a fraction of the world's poetic inheritance. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of traditions, each with its own styles, cultural origins, politics, cosmologies, theological conceits, and technical possibilities. Languages themselves have expressive properties that cannot always be carried intact from one tongue to another. These are not incidental complications. They are the subject.And the complications keep multiplying. Writers who were once consigned to the margins, where the literary establishment could safely ignore them, have entered the conversation. Their work brings different histories, assumptions, and aesthetic priorities to the table. Suddenly, the question of what constitutes a good poem, much less a great poet, becomes considerably more difficult to settle. Whole libraries could be devoted to the subject, and even then we'd have to leave a few things out. The idea that we can sort this unruly abundance into a neat little hierarchy, award the gold medal, and go home happy is appealing mostly to people who like their literary judgments prepackaged.

Besides, declaring one poet the best of a given period means excluding an enormous number of writers and poetic traditions that are vital, interesting, and important to the expression of experiences that might otherwise remain anonymous. Some of these writers may have little in common with the poets we've been taught to admire. Some may not even agree with our definition of poetry. Tough luck for them, I suppose. The judges have spoken.

Here's a more sensible proposition: admit that you're speaking from a particular position, name your favorite poet, and make your case. Explain why this writer matters to you. Tell us what the poems do, how they work, where they succeed, and why you keep coming back to them. You don't have to pretend to have read everything ever written about poetics, nor do you have to produce a dissertation before you're permitted to express an opinion. You do, however, have to offer something more substantial than a declaration of personal taste followed by a shrug.

Call it “heroic criticism.” The heroism involved is modest but real: the willingness to make a judgment without pretending to possess the final word, to defend a writer without demanding that everyone else fall into line. A critic may have only a passing familiarity with the academic conversation surrounding poetry and still produce an intelligent, nuanced argument, provided the argument is grounded in an attentive encounter with the work itself.The point isn't to abandon judgment. It's to stop confusing judgment with ranking. Tell us who matters to you and why. Make the case. If you can return a poet to the reader's life as something more than a name on a syllabus or a candidate for some imaginary literary championship, you've accomplished something worth doing. And you won't have had to declare anybody the greatest poet of the century to do it.

All my friends are going to be strangers

Eliot's Escape from Emotion

In his 1933 book The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot wrote "poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world."  

Eliot was a marvelous, brilliant, subtle poet who saw the 20th century as a place where traditions were shattered to bits by world wars , revolutions and technology and tried to create a poetry that was dually a means of expressing the loss of authorative certainity and a means to piece the world back together where Old Traditions might thrive and better the human condition as a whole. That is pretty vague right there, I admit, but so was Eliot when it came to theorizing about what a poet should actually be trying to do when composing his or her stanzas. But do I agree with what he suggests in the the quote? would agree, yes, generally, but I would also say that good poems, good art can help the mind join a person’s random collection of half processed and ill-remembered experiences and produce a feeling —sensual, spiritual, political, romantic, philosophical—can did exist within the person prior to reading and considering a poet’s (or artist’s) work. 

Much of the time I believe poems, when they are good and evocative , from the pen of a master, can cleave together, the dissociated bits of memories and create a new sensation. It is often said that a poet , novelist, songwriter writes and finishes their individual projects because they want to find out what happens, to discover how it ends.

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MY BOMBASTIC HOT TAKE ABOUT OPEN READINGS CIRCA 1989 -95

 

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming in a close second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. 

Not to grind this axe too long or too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of these overreaching testaments is that no one seems to have had an interesting take on the muse-inspiring incident that happened to them. Too often, the epiphanic moment drives the earnest amateur deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often. This dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership that would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile.Rather than broadening the perspective, as one might hope, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite get rid of, I guess, finally going away after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously. But the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and affecting the senses in ways that seem to produce an irreversible tendency toward grandiloquence, truism, bathos, and rugged individualism.Some of this is inevitable in the course of being human, with our conceit that we are sensitive creatures with something to say. God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my own poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. But if poetry is doing its job, the reader should have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, has been acknowledged, and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking.Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores the fuck out of me.The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and on the shelves of bookstore self-help sections resembles a poem less than it resembles knotted strings of refitted clichés, lacking irony or circumstantial variation.

These are things one says after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience, and perhaps gain some perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: “I did it my way.” Not that Sinatra's cratered croon makes this a desirable way to go through life.We are who we are, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in.One is powerless to control the final outcomes of events, but within the larger picture we can change our actions. We can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results.

Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt.Poetry is fun when it is good.This was not good.Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they are able to write, whatever their style, and they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in a fresh way that is interesting to readers in the outer world.Small thoughts are perfectly fine. One need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the imagist poems of Pound or Williams, for examples.

Even the “less than earth-shaking” poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive. They are engaged with them.Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest, and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take and assume some responsibility for them.Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset. This is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows.Those who refuse to change their ways, who use experience merely as rationale for reinforcing ineffective methods of coping with existence, are dull and self-infatuated much of the time. It's safe to say that they are poor on social skills and social cues both. Not you nor your friends like being around these personalities, yet somehow they keep showing up at the readings and other occasions where only the proper people are in attendence. But that's the life were stuck with. Boring people, bad luck and a variety of bad meals served in pricy cafes are the the existence we have. Such is the material the best poetry is made of. 

THE BOTTOM LINE ON JIM MORRISON'S VALUE AS AN ARTIST

Sometimes I get asked this question, may because I'm an old guy now who remembers the midnight bull sessions appraising the worth of pop stars: Was Jim Morrison really all that?The Doors were a mixed bag for me; the first two albums are among the most important rock albums of all time, with the remainder alternating between the proverbial poles of brilliance and balderdash. As a band, they were simply sublime and unique, with the odd combination of blues, flamenco, classical, jazz, Artaud and epic theater being crafted in their hands to create a sound and feel that was singular and instantly identifiable. 

 As a vocalist, Jim Morrison was often as evocative as the greatest fans proclaim, and it fit the half-awake twilight that seemed to be his constant state of consciousness. As a poet, though, I thought he was simply awful, fragmented, crypto-mystic surrealism that, save for some striking and memorable lines, collapsed from its flimsy elisions and obtuse vagaries. In his posthumous collections,, the pieces read too often like the notebook jottings of an introspective 17-year-old. I say that as one who was an introspective 17 year and is now an introspective 65-year-old. But the front man's low baritone had a rumbling, mulled-over quality that made even the worst images he wrote sound urgent. 

 It wasn't an uncommon habit of young aspiring poets of the day to pour over album lyric sheets provided by bands in an effort to discern deeply embedded meanings. It was a search for knowledge, another ageless activity among the species, and one can offer from experience that curious and impatient teens wanted it revealed at once, right now, immediately. Morrison's stoned swagger and crooning mysticism seemed just the man to serve up to an impatient that was in a hurry to grow up, or, altenately, given the singer's ongoing fascination with death, didn't want to grow up at all. Apocalypse now, right? Morrison might have become the poet he wanted to be had he been able to write, edit, and finesse his work as he desired when he left for Paris. What I will say, though, is that being the vocalist in the Doors gave him the opportunity to go through his writings, his poems, and select many of the stronger passages for the band's more theatrical songs. The Doors, ironically seemed to be an institutional editor for Morrison's words, forcing the bard to decide which of his jottings was actually the most powerful, concise, emphatic.

CREAM WERE NOT JAZZ PLAYERS, BUT THEY JAM THE CRAP OUT OF TWO CHORDS

 

Tonight I was too hot and bored with the what the streaming services had online, a situation that often gives me a hankering for something loud ,distorted, tones that are full expressions of violently playful impulses. Do I have issues? Likely. But I am putting this version up because someone had to; what I like here isn't how much Cream replicates bluesor achieves some nuanced suggestion of emotion, but rather how these instrumentalists--a blues guitarist with no jazz technique whatsoever and two jazz musicians constantly battling it out for who play the busiest business in a live set--but rather how far they were able to stretch this two-chord song into a sixteen improvisation that is, on its own terms, brilliant.

It's about sound, interweaving of guitar, bass and drums, picking up rhythmic cues and tempo changes, at times leaving all resemblance of the song behind and achieving a sort of heaven of pentatonic riffing. Some find this repetitive, and so be it; it's my kind of repetition, like Fillmore Live Miles Davis. Alive, raw, exploratory, nasty, brutal and extended. Jack Bruce and Ginger, bass and drums of Cream, had fairly extensive jazz experience and , as it goes, had a better variety of improvisational approaches to extensive jamming than did Clapton, who was and remains a stylish blues guitarist with limited vocabulary. Bruce has said that he and Baker wanted Clapton to be their Ornette Coleman, and to say the least they challenged the guitarist to rise to the occasion by playing the tunes anywhich way but loose. Clapton never soared magically into jazzy excursions, but what's exciting is to listen to him push his style to the limits.

His playing was never as sharp, blazing or responsive to ideas being thrown at him since Cream broke up. Listening to these searing phrases, repetitive as they are against the rhythm riot perpetrated by Bruce and Baker, makes my senses dance. My issues, so called, are sweetly asleep for the night.

BLUE CHEER AND THE FEEDBACK THAT ENDED REALITY

 It's claimed more often than not that Black Sabbath created heavy metal, a not unreasonable assumption, but I would argue the honor belong's to San Francisco's Blue Cheer. BC's brand of amplified raunch first came on us in 1966 with the release of their initial album Vincebus Eruptum. BS's first release was later, in 1970, and later still in the U.S. Both bands were universally reviled when they respectively appeared, and it was a while later, in waves of reconsideration and nostalgia, that both bands are given more credit for what they did. Blue Cheer has been one of my guilty pleasures for years, fast, atonal, loud enough to be made to record at the end of a San Francisco pier , amps aimed at the Bay, or playing so loud at a free concert that a dog keeled over and died. Their folklore spoke volumes as loud as their first two records.

It wasn't hip at all to like Blue Cheer when their 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was released. It was the usual accusations as the established critics expressed their disgust: out of tune, unable to play their instruments, unbelievably bad imitations of Hendrix and Cream. Some of us liked what these three guys were doing, though. I liked them precisely for the reason that others hated them: for being atonal, loud, full of feedback, distorted in ways that had nothing to do with conventional ideas of texture and musical color and everything to do with making you aware of the nature of the sound, which was sheer electricity wielded by some angry and impatient men eager to make a noise where there had previously been stultifying silence. Blue Cheer was the perfect band for the coming age of speed freakery. The chemical essence wants to take things apart and then reassemble them rapidly, haphazardly, inspired and excited momentarily by new combinations of components to be had from that which was gutted. Like it or not, something new was occurring here, and it was something that could only happen if the players—Dickie Peterson, bass and vocals; Leigh Stephens, guitar; Paul Whaley, drums—had more than a competent grasp of their instruments.

I was introduced to the solar skronk and abrasive swing of Sun Ra at the time through many visits to the Grande Ballroom and developed a taste for the mind-fuckery of free jazz that came from Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ayler, and Coleman. It helped that WABX, the FM underground station in Detroit, played some Black avant-garde music. So I found similarities between what Blue Cheer was doing and the esteemed Black musicians who may have influenced them. The band may well have had no idea of what they were doing conceptually, and the conceit is mine alone. Still, all the same, Blue Cheer handily deconstructed the entire power-trio format, pushing into its three- or four-chord limit with long jams that were groaning, grainy, belching, aggressive, nonlinear improvisations keyed to emotion alone.

They were to the power trio what Neal Cassady was to drive. I consider Dick Peterson an able, if not great, bassist. Still, unquestionably, he was one of the most terrific white-blues screamers of all time—his singing was rage, self-pity, and uncontrollable impulse fused in each frayed, corrosive syllable he spat out. His bandsaw-on-steel vocals, joined with guitarist Leigh Stephens' PULVERIZING ATONAL GUITAR SOLOS and drummer Paul Whaley's trash-can demolition, laid the groundwork for a generation of metal and punk bands to come: MC5, STOOGES, MOUNTAIN, LED ZEP, RAMONES, MOTORHEAD, DEAD BOYS. Even the Velvet Underground, with their feedback skronk, couldn't match Blue Cheer's steel-belted forays into electrified abandon; the Velvets merely taunted the strings of their guitars, while Blue Cheer sounded like they punched holes in oil tankers. And Peterson's vocalizations were the perfect match: screech, rasp, and banshee wail all rolled into one bag of verbal outrage, maintaining a punk's slouch. His was the rusty yowl that deserved to be praised and dreaded for the unflinching combination of fear and rage it represented.

Leigh Stephens' broadsides were genuinely beautiful cascades of dissonance, pulverizing atonal breaks, the emphasis on pulverizing. I saw these guys at the Grande as well. It seems to me, thinking about it decades later, that this was not a man of sub-competence flailing and noodling about the frets, but someone who knew what he wanted to sound like and could get the result he desired, and that he was someone who could duplicate that sound on command. Paul Whaley, in turn, had the most expansive, most enormous, most sledgehammer-like drumming style of the period. His sound was of every building and bridge that ever collapsed under its own weight. This is to say that I think the first two Blue Cheer albums need to be reconsidered.